My work
An important update
Things have changed since the last time I've updated this page. I don't work for Yahoo! anymore — no more purple t-shirts and stuff. Things are deadly serious — now I work for Google. Indeed I do and consider it an epic win :-)
New page content will pop up at some point; for a time being here's the...
Old page content
As I have probably mentioned, I work for Yahoo! in one of the most innovative and interesting groups – Yahoo! Geo Technologies. What do we do here? Historically, people were inclined to think, that Geo == Maps. Well, it is not quite true – and probably it never was.
For most “geo-muggles” there’re two uses of Geo:
- Go to maps website and check the route to somewhere
- Go to maps website and find a pizza takeaway next door.
These two use-cases are valid and, arguably, cover most of what people really need in their day-to-day lives, that is what they see and they don’t care about it more than they should. But there’s a different side of the Web – the side of content providers, portals, news websites, local websites and many others. There’s one common thing among them: they want their content to be as relevant to the end-user as possible. And – more and more often – relevant means local. Local news, local web pages, local gossips, local blogs and local social connections – it’s all around you, that’s the stuff which really matters. And this is what Yahoo! Geo Technologies team is doing, better than many others.
I will not list our products here – you should go to our page at YDN and you probably will find all the relevant (and local too!) information about it, but I want to list two mash-ups I’ve created using Yahoo! geo-platform.
First one is called WoeID Info. WoeID is the concept invented here in this group and means “Where on Earth Identifier” – we aim to identify every place on earth and assign this identifier. Why do I need this, if I have coordinates of place – you may ask? Why, of course you do – but do coordinates tell you anything about how big is the place? Or what’s it’s name in Spanish? Or what are the neighbour places? Or what is the parent place, in which county is it located and which London borough it belongs to? Hardly. That’s when WoeID comes to help you. Check this tiny tool – try to search for some places you’ve been, and try to find some you’ve never heard of. It’s really fun – you can type almost any English word and we’ve got a place for that! No more about it. Just check it here: http://sigizmund.info/woeidinfo
Second one is PhotoMaker – again, it’s a very simple mash-up, which takes a news article (or some arbitrary text), extracts all location names from it and tries to find CC-licensed photographs on Flickr which were geotagged at or near this location. Try to copy this article from National Geographic and paste it to PhotoMaker – you will be surprised, how many places are there which you haven’t heard about.
I would like you to tell quite a bit more about Geo and what we’re doing in this area – but you may get bored. On the other hand, if you won’t, please feel free to check our group’s blog ygeoblog.com and follow us on our twitter @YahooGeo.
To give some more background on what I am doing – I am deeply engaged into various research projects which we do in conjunction with Yahoo! Research group. Probably, it’s the most fantastic stuff I was ever doing – it involves significant amount of machine learning, information retrieval and statistical processing. We extensively use Hadoop for these tasks, as most of the problems are so heavy-weight they are simply cannot be computed on a single machine (no matter how powerful it is) in a reasonable time. Nothing has been published yet, but when success will inevitable find us, I am really going to update this page with that information. Ultimately, this is the area I really admire and would really prefer to work in – so far I had lots of chances to do so.